Scenarios

Your First Tournament, Set Up Properly

The golf is the same golf. What is different is that the round is governed, the card is official, and half the equipment you normally lean on is not allowed. This is the setup side: what to decide before you go, what to switch off on the first tee, and what the round is worth to you afterwards.

What actually changes on the day

Three things, and only three things, are genuinely different from your normal Saturday.

• The card is a document. Somebody else marks your score, you check it, you sign it, you hand it in. Whatever is on your phone is your copy, not the record.
• You play off a number you may never have used. Your Handicap Index becomes a Course Handicap for the tees in play, and then a Playing Handicap after the competition's allowance is applied. If those three words are new, read course handicap vs playing handicap before you enter, not on the first tee.
• Equipment rules apply. Rule 4.3 covers what a device may do during a stipulated round, and most golfers using a phone every week are quietly breaching it.

Everything else is a normal round. If the format on the entry sheet is unfamiliar, golf formats explained covers stroke play, Stableford, match play and the team formats in one place. This page assumes you know what you are playing and deals with the app.

The week before: three things to settle

Tournament preparation collapses into three decisions, and none of them should be made in the car park.

One: the tees. Your competition tees are fixed by the entry, not by you. Open the course in ParPath and select that exact tee set, because the Course Rating and Slope shown against each tee are the numbers your handicap arithmetic depends on. Men's and women's tees carry separate ratings even where the yardage is identical, so pick the one your handicap is tracked against.

Two: the plan. ParPath is a goal you choose, not a prediction. You pick a target score for the course, and the plan marks every hole Green, Yellow or Red and gives it a target of par, bogey or worse, so the targets sum to the goal you picked. The plan is generated per course and per tee from the card data the course has, that is par, stroke index, yardage and elevation, plus hazard positions and fairway width on holes that have been mapped. A tournament is a bad day to pick an ambitious goal. Take the one you would be happy to sign for.

Three: whether the number you are playing off is the number the app knows. ParPath produces its own handicap estimate once you have completed three rounds that qualify, which means at least fourteen holes scored on an eighteen, or seven on a nine, with a nine-hole differential doubled the way the World Handicap System does it. That estimate is for watching your own progress. It is not an official golf handicap, and the committee will use the number from your club or association. Enter the competition with the official one.

What the Rules say about the phone in your pocket

This is the part worth getting right, because it is the one that can cost you the competition rather than a shot.

Under Rule 4.3a(1) a player may get distance information from a device that measures distance. That permission is the default, and it means a GPS yardage to the middle of the green is fine. What is not fine is using a device to gauge or measure other conditions that could affect the shot, such as elevation change or wind, or to get a recommendation on which club to hit. A device that offers those functions is acceptable as long as those functions are switched off and not used.

The second half matters as much as the first. A Committee may adopt a Local Rule that prohibits distance-measuring devices entirely for its competition. Where that Local Rule is in force, no device, no yardage, no exceptions. It will be printed on the notice to players, on the back of the card, or on the board by the first tee. Read it. Nobody will read it to you, and the app cannot know what your Committee decided.

So the honest position: ParPath is not blanket tournament legal, and no app is. Whether you may use it depends on the Local Rules of your event, and which parts you may use depends on which functions are running.

Competition Mode, and exactly what it switches off

Competition Mode is a toggle in the round setup screen, under the players step. Turn it on and the round runs with the non-conforming functions disabled rather than relying on you to avoid tapping them. It is a Pro feature.

What it switches off for that round:

• Slope-adjusted plays-like distances, so the yardage shown is the raw GPS number and nothing else
• Wind, temperature and altitude adjustments
• Club recommendations on the map
• Strokes gained, and the shot dispersion circle on the hole map

What still works:

• Raw GPS yardages to front, middle and back
• The hole map itself, on courses that have one
• Your game plan and its per-hole targets
• Scoring, including stats you enter yourself

You can see it is on without checking. A gold Competition marker sits in the round header while you play, and the round settings sheet carries a Competition section restating the Rule 4.3 position. The setting is stored with the round rather than being a global preference, so it applies to that round and nothing else.

One judgement call the toggle does not make for you. ParPath notes are strategy written from course data, not a measurement or a club recommendation, and Rule 4.3 does not restrict written strategy notes or a yardage book. If your Committee has prohibited devices outright, none of that applies and the phone stays in the bag.

On the first tee: the forty-second setup

Round setup is a short flow, and for a tournament four of its choices matter.

One more option worth knowing about: the round settings screen has a switch that hides your running score and totals while leaving individual hole scores visible. If your problem is doing arithmetic on the 14th tee and then trying to protect a number, that switch removes the number.

During the round: two numbers, nothing else

The scoring screen carries a lot. In a competition you want almost none of it. Two numbers do the work.

The target on the hole in front of you. ParPath gives each hole a colour and a number. Green holes are where the plan expects you to score, red holes are where the plan expects you to survive, and the target is a specific score, not an aspiration. On a red hole a bogey is the plan working. This is the single most useful thing on the screen in a competition, because the pressure of an official card is what makes people abandon a plan on the second bad hole.

Whether you are ahead of or behind the plan. The ParPath progress view shows the target for the round and a forecast of where you finish at your current rate, then lists each hole with its target beside what you actually made. Being three over the plan through eight holes is information. It is not a reason to try to get it back on the ninth, which is how a bad round becomes a withdrawn one. The compounding version of that mistake is covered in how to stop blow-up holes wrecking your round.

Everything else can wait. Enter the score on the walk to the next tee, keep pace with the group in front, and remember that the paper card your marker is keeping is the one that counts.

After the card is signed

Hand in the official card first; that stays the tournament's record. The round in ParPath is a parallel copy that lands in your own history alongside it, and it is worth three things.

• A count of targets hit. The round summary shows how many of the per-hole target scores you beat, and names the holes where the score ran past the target by the most. On a course you will play again in a year, that list is the preparation for next time.
• A contribution to your handicap estimate. Completed rounds with enough holes scored feed the estimate automatically. If the round should not count, each round has its own toggles to exclude it from the handicap estimate and from goal tracking.
• A comparable score. The round carries the tee set you played and its Course Rating and Slope, so a tournament round on an unfamiliar championship course sits next to your home rounds as a differential rather than as a raw number that looks worse than it was.

Two things it is not. It is not your official score, which the committee posts. And it is not a verdict on whether you belong in competitive golf, which is a question one round has never answered for anybody. If the field was strong and the day felt fast, playing golf with better players is about that specific discomfort.